I think you misunderstand what I meant. The computer screen you have, that you look at in real life, is crap. It's really dull. A real sheet of white paper outside on a moderately cloudy day is brighter than the white background of these forums is on a screen.

To make you think something's bright in a game, you need to make everything else look dark. If you just tint everything darker, you won't be able see anything but the bright stuff.

HDR [software] adjusts the brightness of everything you see on the screen individually so the darker things get darker when you can see brighter things, and darker things get brighter when you can't see brighter things. The trick INovae's been having a bit of trouble figuring out is how to stop the screen from turning pitch black when you look at something too bright for the system, or getting the blackness of space to glow overly brightly when you're looking into the darkness. Just adding a tinted canopy isn't going to fix that, unfortunately.

Correct. The goal is to ensure that the raw light from the star isn't dumped directly into the HDR math. So both direct and indirect light have to be muted. The direct light can be handled by selective filtering (canopy, HUD, VR, whatever), producing an eclipse/muting of the star no matter where it is in the field of view. The indirect light can be handled by making all pertinent surfaces non-reflective (e.g. Vantablack)

The controls in the cockpit just have to be contrast-managed; make sure that the controls have a different level of light than the surrounding panel. If lit, then they need to be kept at a level that doesn't blind the pilot in low light conditions. Alternately, they can be backlit, like a keyboard.

If you just tint everything darker, you won't be able see anything but the bright stuff.

Actually that is not true...tinting doesn't block out all the other darker elements 100% as you assert. It really depends on the degree of tint and even the color. What's more it's not so much about the tint as the illusion of tint. I think we can all agree that gaming is all an illusion, as such what is seen depends on what is being computed and what settings those computations allow. What's more, it would be advantages if lighting/brightness/color had at least a certain degree of adjust-ability because players are well aware that real spaceships use tinted glass to cut out the hard exterior brightness - attempts to make space realistic shouldn't be at the cost of making spaceships less realistic.

Tinted glass on spaceships is not design lore - it's fact and commonly used. So you want to keep the realism of brightness in space but not the realism of spaceflight - ok? What's more, tinted glass might be an elegant solution that not only supports cockpit visibility but the ability for players to customize interior brightness and tint - eventually.

How light refracts through a surface is programming - but I guess you didn't read the memo. Even Star Citizen has tinted windows on some of its ships, if not most. As for how much it effects interior lighting that, would, actually depend on computations.

I was talking about the HDR system to deal with the brightness range. That has nothing to do with wanting to tint the cockpit windows.

For example: how do you know the windows aren't tinted already? There's no outside view of the glass and the light shining on the inside would be darker from the tint, your eyes (and the HDR system) would adjust accordingly.

If you doubt that, look at some photographs from inside of fighter cockpits looking out. You can't tell they're tinted because the camera adjusts to the lower light levels.

So now that it's possible to program in tinted glass, I guess it won't be necessary to ship a piece of tinted glass to Keith's office....really wish you would make up your mind what is and isn't possible.What's more tint is used to mitigate brightness range. HDR may very well be a solution but so maybe tinted glass, or even a combination should one not suffice. Who knows - or more accurately, only the DEVs know - whatever gets the job done depending on budget/time constraints.

This whole discussion is stupid. There is no need for tinting anything. You can literally fly to the sun, turn around and look at your ship and see that the game adjusts the brightness so that the ship has the usual exposure appearance. In real life your eyes would evaporate and the ship too and everything would be white.The problem is that the game adjusts the brightness to a luminance of about the luminance of grey regardless of whats beeing shown. This is why the galaxy is way to bright when no bright objects are covering large parts of the screen like for example planets or stations. Planets are suffering from overexposure from afar because they are too small to make a difference when the game sets its exposure levels.What could be done about it would for example setting a exposure cutoff that would not make the galaxy appear to be brighter than a certain treshold.The other problem is the lack of bright surfaces scattering light and illuminating darker areas, this is why there are often stark contrasts.

Old cargo and mining ship wrecks laying derelict on moon and planets, some hidden by time some hidden up in high mountain passes. Full of ore and supplies and valuable machinery which might jump start a small mining operation and give an advantage